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They shouldn’t have been at risk here. They’d sold off most of the land years ago. The house and the grounds still marked them as wealthy, certainly, but they should’ve been too far inland to make a tempting prize. Even with cannon fire booming from the shore, Mary had relaxed as soon as she’d called the children in, thinking they’d all be safe inside the house.
They should’ve been. There are far richer takings between them and the shore, enough to hold off any pirate crew. No one should have bothered wandering far enough from their ship to find them.
It seems the hoard currently tossing their home for valuables would beg to differ.
Mary tightens her arms around her children, holding them close as clatters and crashes and raucous laughter echo press in all around them. Every breath feels borrowed now. She doesn’t even know why they’re still alive.
The pirate who had swept in at the front of the pack and herded them into the corner of the study had only said, “Stay here. Keep quiet,” and Mary’s first instinct had been to fight back. Even with Alma and Louis clinging to her skirts, even with the danger of the situation an acrid tang in her mouth, something in her bristled violently at being issued orders. At someone coming into her home and telling her what was and wasn’t allowed.
She’s not sure what it was that gave her pause. Common sense, she’d like to think—but, well, she knows herself well enough to admit that that’s unlikely. Maybe it was just the visual contrast, earthy browns in a sea of black leather, tugging at her artist’s brain, trying to find meaning where there’s none. Maybe it was the look in their eyes: intent, nearly desperate, but not cruel.
Or maybe Mary was just too scared to fight back after all.
That same brown-coated pirate is still standing near them, flipping a dagger around the knuckles of one hand with casual ease. The lines of their body look relaxed, but there’s a tension hidden in their casual stance that Mary feels echoed in the stiffness of her own spine.
That tension ratchets up at the sound of uneven footsteps approaching the door, but it hardly matters. Mary already knows from a single nervous glance that things have just gone from bad to worse.
She recognizes the man stepping through the door—not that she’s ever met him, but she’s met enough men like him to know his type on sight. The type of man whose own size rankles him, makes him determined to tower over others by any means necessary. The type of man who’ll kill them just to prove he can.
“Widow Bonnet.” His voice comes out like smoke, a ragged, raspy wisp that feels as though it leaves a residue where it settles against her skin. His hand is resting on the hilt of his sword and he bares his teeth, something between a smile and a snarl, as he looks from her to the children and back again. “My apologies for this disruption to your household. Rest assured, we hope to keep it as brief as possible. If you’ll simply tell us where your husband has hidden himself, we’ll collect him and be on our way.”
Fucking Stede.
Mary takes a deep, unsteady breath.
“I . . . appreciate the offer.” She lifts her hands to keep Louis and Alma’s faces turned into her, hoping it looks like she’s only shielding their ears and not their expressions. “By all means, if you’d like to take him with you, you can find him outside St. Mary’s. I believe we’ve got a shovel out by the shed you can borrow it if you didn't bring your own.”
She’s bracing herself before the man even starts to step forward, lips pulled back in a snarl. She lifts her chin and keeps her eyes locked on his, praying that’s enough to keep his attention focused on lashing out at her instead of the children. If she can just—
A slim blade flashes past his face before he’s taken more than a step, and his head whips around to follow it as he rears back. The knife is already in the wall by the time his eyes find it, sunk up to the hilt. Color still riding high on his cheeks, the man turns from it to glare murder at the pirate dressed in brown.
“Slipped,” they say with a shrug, another knife already in hand.
“You think you’re funny?” There’s a growl to his voice now, the aggressive cant to his posture a dangerous contrast to the other pirate’s relaxed and ready stance.
“I think if Blackbeard wanted me doing something else, I wouldn’t be in this house at all right now.” As if by magic, another blade appears in their other hand as they stare back at him. “But here I am.”
Mary’s stomach has turned to water. The two pirates are still sneering and snapping at each other, but everything seems far-away, muffled, as that name continues ringing in her ears.
Blackbeard.
Stede, she thinks furiously, desperately. What did you do?
Another set of footsteps, heavy and deliberate, cuts through the noise like gunshots. For a brief, hopeful moment Mary’s able to lie to herself, pretend she believes that could be anyone at all approaching. Then the other two fall silent and that hope dies away.
He’s just a man, Mary tells herself. The children are shaking against her, their terrified tears soaking through her dress. She runs her hands over their hair, forces her shoulders back. Just a man. Maybe vicious and bloodthirsty, but underneath it all just a fucking man.
Then he steps into the room, and once again, she knows that she was wrong.
This isn’t a man—it’s a wraith. A bogeyman. This is the thing that lurks in the caverns of ancestral memory and makes humans fear the dark.
A mane of hair falls in tangles around his face, strands of gray and black that make her think again of smoke. There’s a streak of sooty black smeared across his eyes like a mask, and more black covers the inch or two of beard on his jaw, as if he’d set the rest on fire and this is all that’s left. His eyes are as cold and pitiless as death, and there’s something about the way he moves that stokes a primal terror, an unhurried deliberateness that says no matter how fast you run he’ll always catch you. You’ll never get away.
“Well? Where is he?” Blackbeard’s voice is a surprise, rich and smooth if every bit as cold as his gaze.
“Captain.” The man in black straightens, standing with nearly military precision. His eyes narrow in warning, flicking between Mary and the other pirate before he returns his full attention to his captain. “Dead and buried,” he says with sharp satisfaction. “His widow here has given her gracious permission for us to dig the body up, however, if you’d like to take a souvenir.”
Those icy eyes are on Mary again, dispassionately examining her. His gaze drops to the children, and for an instant she thinks she sees a flicker of something on his face—regret, maybe, or remorse? But it’s gone as quickly as it appeared, if it was ever really there at all.
“I’d like to have a word with the widow alone,” Blackbeard says after a moment. “Jim, you and Ivan take the kids outside. Mr. Hands, round up the others and head back for the ship.”
Jim, the one in brown, balks for a moment. When their eyes meet Mary’s there’s a world of uncertainty there, an impulse to get the children away from this room at war with their hesitation to leave Mary here alone.
This is a pirate, a member of Blackbeard’s crew. It’s madness to even consider trusting them.
Mary thinks of the knife embedded in her wall and holds their stare.
Take them, she thinks with all the force she can muster, willing them to hear her. Keep them safe. If this is my end, I don’t want them to see it. Please.
Jim steps forward. Mary kisses the tops of her children’s heads, whispering reassurances as she pries their hands away, and sends them off.
“Captain,” Hands starts again, “are you sure—”
“Was I asking, Izzy?”
There’s unmistakable menace in his pleasant tone but he isn’t even looking, doesn’t see the way the other man pales even as his eyes light up with respectful adoration. A quick nod he doesn’t see, a murmured, “Sir,” and they’re alone.
Blackbeard is aimlessly examining items on the desk as the door closes, fingers skating over a quill, a pot of ink, a silver-handled letter opener. Mary’s heart is a trapped bird in her chest, her throat, and whatever he’s going to do to her she wishes he’d just—
“This is the second time you’ve declared your husband dead.” She’d been waiting for him to speak, but the sound of his voice still makes her jump. “Seeing as how he was still very much alive the last time you did so, I’m sure you understand my skepticism.”
He still hasn’t turned to face her. She’d think he was only talking to himself if not for the cold congeniality still threaded through this voice, sending a shudder down her spine.
“Presumed dead.” Mary risks a quick glance at the knife still lodged in the wall. Could she move fast enough to grab it before he reached her? “He just—he disappeared on that ship of his one night without a word—”
Blackbeard makes a terrible sound at that, something broken and animal. “Yeah. I fuckin’ bet he did.”
“He didn’t really know anything about sailing, so.” She edges ever so slightly toward the knife, her eyes locked on his back. “We thought he’d probably been lost at sea.”
Hoped, she doesn’t say. It seems crass now that she understands him better.
“So what makes you think he didn’t just sneak off again this time?” Blackbeard idly plucks a paperweight from the desk, turning it this way and that. “Seems to be what he does.”
“I don’t have to wonder what happened to him this time.” Mary hears the sharpness creeping into her own voice, and the bubble of hysteria lodged beneath the panic threatens to burst loose. “I saw it, and so did half of Bridgetown. He died, we buried what was left, that’s all there is to say. Whatever vengeance you came here looking for, I’m afraid you’ll have to dig up his corpse to get it.”
Nothing then but silence, broken only by the sound of Mary’s uneven breathing. The house around them is silent, too, only the two of them left within its walls. Blackbeard’s grip on the heavy bronze mastiff has gone white-knuckled, but when he finally speaks his voice is even. Calm.
“It’s really true, then. Stede Bonnet is dead.”
Mary swallows hard. “He is.”
There’s another long beat of silence, tension in the air as taut as a drawn bowstring. When it snaps it’s with the whip of Blackbeard’s arm flinging the paperweight against the wall, into the wall, leaving only a ragged hole behind.
He doesn’t even pause to see the carnage. As soon as the statue leaves his hand he’s moving, sweeping his arms across the top of the desk with a furious bellow. He’s at the shelves a bare moment later, a storm made flesh, raging and destroying everything within his reach.
Mary flings herself back into the corner, shoulder blades aching where they slammed against the wall, feet scrabbling as if she can burrow into it. The sole of one shoe catches something and she nearly falls as a partially rounded something shoots out from under her, clattering across the room. The sound and movement of it catch Blackbeard’s attention and he snatches it up with a snarl, his eyes half-blind with fury, and—
He falters.
The object in his hand is misshapen, oddly colored. Alma’s petrified orange half—she must have dropped it sometime during the raid. Mary hadn’t noticed, and Alma must not have, either. She carries the thing around like it’s precious, never likes to let it out of her sight.
Blackbeard sucks in a single wet, quavering breath, and Mary barely has time to notice the trembling in his fingers, the look on his face as if someone’s just run him through. With his fury interrupted he collapses like a puppet whose strings have just been cut, his hair a ragged curtain around his face and his body curled protectively around Alma’s orange.
His sobs echo through the empty house, and the pain of it is almost unbearable. Mary watches the violence of his grief wrack his body, as though the tears are being wrenched out of him, leaving him shaking from the force of it. Her heart is aching, her head is buzzing, and only one thought surfaces through it all.
“. . . Ed?”
It’s a wild, impossible guess, absurd as soon as she says it out loud, but his head whips up in baffled alarm. The black on his face is streaked and smeared, his eyes wild with anguish and confusion, and Mary has to slide down the wall as she feels her own legs give out.
“Oh my God.” She presses a hand to her mouth as she stares back at him with what must be an equally wild-eyed look. “Are you Ed?”
“How d’you . . .” He seems to be casting around for a possible explanation. “Who used that name? Jim?”
“He talked about you. Stede . . .” Mary has to take a moment, steadying herself under the weight of this revelation. “Stede talked about you.”
His face crumples again and his body curls back in, arms curved over his head like he’s trying to hide.
“Shit. Shit, no, he’s—” Mary leans forward and nearly crawls toward him before she stops herself, an instinctive response to his grief and her guilt. “He’s not dead. I’m sorry, I didn’t—if I’d know it was you, I wouldn’t have—”
“What the fuck?” he sniffles, looking up again. “The fuck d’you mean, he isn’t dead? And what do you mean, if you’d known it was me?”
He swipes at his tears, smearing the kohl on his face even further. There’s a look in his eyes now, a fragile spark of hope inside the tempest of anger and pain. Another piece of the man clicks into place, and there it is, Mary can see it now. Stede was always . . . Stede, of course, but Blackbeard seemed a bit much even for him. Loving this baffling Gordian mess in front of her, though? That makes far more sense.
“It’s a bit of a story, if you’ve got the time.” She glances up and lets out a sigh of relief when she sees his fury didn’t have time to reach the decanter of whiskey on the side table. “Let’s have a drink.”